So last year, even though I never seem to run into any malware, I renew my subscription to AVG Anti-Spware because of its memory scan returning "leaked" RAM. I didn't realize my MemInfo could do the same thing. I always have over one half of my 1gig but I'm a RAMaholic. So I discover RAM Def XT which does the same thing in about 40 seconds (it's definitely a keeper!). But this little gem you'll really love! Now every 30 seconds sounds a little much but you never even notice it or you can just adjust it yourself in scheduling. I made it every two hours.

Anyone else tried this?

This program runs behind the scenes in Task Manager. How are you able to tweak it?

OMG command run.

Well, that was fun. Bye bye free program.

Thanks for the link, Slowday. I've only had this running for a short time, but it seems like a great little program -- quite different from any other memory manager I've ever tried.

Actually, Corona, there's not a lot of tweaking to do -- and this is not a memory resident program running all the time in the background. Actually, it's only called for about every 30 minutes (default) by the Windows Task Scheduler -- runs for just a few seconds -- then goes away. If you want to change the frequency it runs, you can do so in Windows Task Scheduler (Advanced).

By the way, I would suggest that anybody interested in trying this program should read the info on the website -- it was written by the app creator. He gives some insight as to how it works.

If I'm not mistaken, I think the default setting is 30 minutes -- not 30 seconds.

Typo, I did mean minutes. I just installed this on my Vista notebook and it seems to really make a nice difference on it. I left it at 30 minutes and have the XP at every hour now.

Its not a bad little utility but it does make Windows Defender pop up an event when it runs.

I don't use Windows Defender, so I have experienced that problem.

I've only been using it since yesterday when Slowday posted it, but so far, it seems like a slick little memory utility -- very different from other memory managers. It's totally transparent and doesn't use any resources -- just shows up periodically and very quickly does its thing -- then disappears again. Nothing to set -- nothing to fiddle with. Seems like an especially GREAT solution for anyone experiencing memory leak problems.

Windows Defender comes standard with Vista but has to be downloaded and installed for XP and I like it.

At my advancing age I can use all the help I can get.

Strange! I have WD enabled on both the XP and Vista machines and that hasn't occurred.

Okay, will somebody please point me in the direction of the nearest Windows task scheduler. I keep ending up in Windows/System32. I don't see it and no way am I gonna touch anything in there.

Here goes:

Start / Control Panel / (switch to 'classic view' on the left) / Scheduled Tasks

Okay! Thank you! I knew I've been around there before.

"RAM Optimizers have no effect, and at worst, they seriously degrade performance. Although gaining more available memory might seem beneficial, it isn't. As RAM Optimizers force the available-memory counter up, they force other processes' data and code out of memory. Say that you're running Word, for example. As the optimizer forces the available-memory counter up, the text of open documents and the program code that was part of Word's working set before the optimization (and was therefore present in physical memory) must be reread from disk as you continue to edit your document. The act of allocating, then freeing a large amount of virtual memory might, as a conceivable side effect, lead to blocks of contiguous available memory. However, because virtual memory masks the layout of physical memory from processes, processes can't directly benefit from having virtual memory backed by contiguous physical memory. As processes execute and undergo working-set trimming and growth, their virtual-memory-to-physical-memory mappings will become fragmented despite the availability of contiguous memory."

Sources: Page 1 and Page 2.

Mark Russinovich is definitely the best and most reliable source for Windows Internals.

Please don't copy from other sources it just junks up the forum.
Please provide your comment and link.
This subject has to be "searched" on the forum first.Then read.
davey

I saw no need to paraphrase, as the information is perfectly accurate and not the first time I've shared that snippit.

I have however updated my wiki Myths page to reflect what Mark says (links only).

http://wiki.lunarsoft.net/wiki/Myths

We enjoy your site also.
davey

CleanMem is gone from my XP Pro system!

I did not notice any system performance improvement as it appeared to slow down in fact.

But cleanmem isnt the same as other memory cleaners. Other memory cleaners are fake as they simply use up all ram there is forcing windows to release ram and move it to the page file.

Cleanmem simply runs 1 api call and lets windows handle the rest.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682606(VS.85).aspx

which if you used cleanmem and watched your page file and virtual memory settings neither grow at all, and in fact the page file drops by a few mb.

The memory that is unused windows simply cleans up, the process can then take it back when it is needed. This is why you actually see a increase in free memory.
Nothing huge but when you have a exe with a memory leak a tool that can tell windows to go clean it up is the trick.

I have been a programmer for many years and know windows memory very well. I also know how much of a pain it is, this program doesnt clean the memory it asks windows to. Since windows is in charge of keeping things clean it makes sence to have windows do the work.

But please before you bash and shoot down a program that you havent even tested and verified please do your homework on why people are even talking about this app in the first place.

http://www.pcwintech.com/tools/CleanMem.html

you can see your not the only one who thought this was a bogus program like majorgeeks did, till they ran it through tests and found it was for real.

Oh forgot to mention, the reason why a lot of the memory cleaners out there dont use this api call is because it wasnt documented till .net, every time you minimize a .net program the memory cleans itself up, this is the api call that is built into .net

Cleanmem simply took that nice little tweak from ms and applies it to the other processes.

Thanks for the informative input.Some users refuse to believe that old problems can be handled in new ways.
They hear a word or phrase and respond with the same old response.
YoKenny is not that kind of user.He investigates and discovers better ways are available.
I don't think he is ever finished checking things out.
davey

Yeah I have seen that big time since I released cleanmem a few days ago.

A buddy of mine couldn't remember my new site name and so googled cleanmem and found this forum and he tells me people are having trouble understanding how it works. By the time I get here to answer questions I read post from people who haven't tried it and are shooting it down.

I guess I just take a lot of pride in my work and I try my hardest to make everyone happy. Something I have to realize is making everyone happy is just not going to happen.

But let me give some insight on how i came across the api call.

I run my own computer repair and been a programmer for a long time, when I started playing around with vb .net (I still use vb 6) I noticed it was a memory hog but when you minimized it the memory went down. I wanted to know how it did this and after doing some research I found the api that .net calls to clean itself up. So I started using it in my cs fire monitor and seen it worked very well. So I then decided to make one for my customers when I do windows reinstalls and so for over the past year my program has been running on a few hundred machines and the program doesnt really give a performance increase, but it keeps the system cleaned up of memory leaks.

Well once I got my new site up I wanted to release my first tool so I decided to take my tool and release it.

And so here i am trying my best to answer questions and working on more free tools to release.

So if anyone ever has concern or wants to know exactly whats going on in any one of my programs all they have to do is ask.

Anyways sorry if I came off rough.

-Shane

I don't think they will mind if you leave you site address.

No not to rough.YoKenny just calls it like he sees it at the time.
Could there be any access conflicts?
My system is pretty basic.I will be testing your program myself.
davey

the program call for permissions to run the api on each process. protected processes like antivirus and such cant be touch.

The ideal situation for the program is on servers and machines under heavy usage or computers that haven't shut off in weeks.

We all have seen how explorer.exe (good example) climbs in memory use as the day goes on, thus a memory leak.

The api doesn't interfere with a process, even ones currently climbing in memory, the api basicly goes in and clears all unused memory and thats it
if memory is in use its not touched so the process doesnt suffer, nothing in anyway changes, the page file, virtual memory all of it is untouched and doesnt grow.

Well with the program you just set it and forget it. I use the task scheduler to run the cleanmem.exe by default 30 min, but great thing about the task scheduler is the user can change it to anything they like.

if your system has only been on for a few hours, you havent done much and dont have much running and have plenty of free memory your not going to notice anything. Cause you system only slows down when you run out of memory.

But at least now you dont have to worry about memory leaks in processes sucking up all the memory. Thats the real goal of the program.

So you can see how on servers, gaming systems, people using memory hungry programs like autocad and photoshop get a great use out of cleanmem. But even a normal user can have it running and keep things running like they should.

anyways my site is www.pcwintech.com I have a how to on there for the task scheduler that might be helpful.

if you want a great way to see how well it works do this, open your task manager and click on the processes tab, now find explorer.exe, now go and open a bunch of folders and do things in windows and watch the memory grow with explorer.

Now go to start and then run
type in cleanmem and hit ok

Now watch the memory of explorer in 5 sec it will drop, it will grow slowly again when you use explorer again but thats the point, keep things clean.

Shane

There is no refuting Mark's credentials, however, if you read many of the posts in that thread it becomes quite evident that, depending on what applications are running and how you are using the PC, Windows doesn't always do the perfect job. It is quite analogous to the "old" carburetor on vehicles. They were manufactured and tuned to work in an "average" environment. e.g. temp, humidity, elevation, etc. Also, this thread was started in relation to an application that uses Windows feature every 30 minutes (or as often as one likes), maximizing the efficiency of the Windows tool.

This only seems to work in XP and not Vista.

Open taskmanager and note explorer's mem usage.

Leave taskmanager running and open My Documents then minimize to tray and then note explorer's mem.

Note Taskmanager's mem usage and minimize then bing it back up.

Using Returnil here using the mem cache method and I want my system to use as much memory as it needs.

Vista uses a superfetch feature which loads most frequently apps into memory after desktop comes up.

Another point on this subject! I don't know if RAM defragers are different from optimizers (have never even tried one of them) but the numbers just don't back the theory that the defragers just move some of the process to virtual memory. I had a Subscription to Spy Sweeper and through work, Spyware Doctor. If I did a full scan with either one of those I would be left with less than 50% of my 1g of RAM. The RAM would never return all day. Then I discovered that a two minute memory scan with AVG Anti-Spyware would result in returning total RAM usage to only 20 some percent. I just enabled SD Starter Edition and scanned with it. After the scan I ended up with 46% of RAM in use and 40.1mb of virtual memory in use. I then ran a 38 second scan with RAM Def XT. After the scan I had only 27% of RAM in use and the page file in use actually went down to 39.9mb. Point is, this program didn't just move the processes to virtual memory. I suspect the MemInfo defrager and AVg do the same.

That's true with Windows 9x/Me. The memory management was horrific. People believed in the "AlwaysUnloadDll" registry key, even for the NT kernel. I use multiple applications that often take about half of all of my 2GB of RAM, but you can simply minimize the window and the memory is freed. Try it with Firefox or any web browser. Before you could see 272,000 K in Task Manager, but when you minimize Firefox you can watch it drop to 11,000 K - 20,000 K. In case you're wondering, I often run over 30+ tabs in my Firefox, so the memory usage is higher than most people's would be.


They are the same. I remember AVG AS and I believe ewido 4 doing this. After doing a bit of research it was an unfortunate side effect.

On vista the only time I have seen cleanmem not work was when vista was giving it rights to do the job.

I have it running on a my vista all day, BUT i have UAC turned off and superfech turned off.

if you have the uac on try this instead, go to the windows task scheduler, and you should see the cleanmem entry, right click on it and go to properties,
at the bottom should be a check to run with highest privileges put a check on that and hit apply and then ok. now right click on the entry and click run.

See if it works then. if so the uac is blocking it, you may have to right click on cleanmem and go to the compatibility tab and tell it to run as administrator.

A pain im sure. All my customers run with uac turned off. The reason being is all the uac has done is teach my customers to just click ok every time it pops up without even reading it! but I dont want to start on the uac debate lol.

But look, the cleanmem is free, small and there if you need it. There will be people who like it and people who dont which we have seen here. it simply a tool ive had been using for over a year and decided to share! You have my respect if you tried it but it just wasn't for you, I thank you for testing it.

If you tried it and plan on using it good for you, im glad I could help.

Shane

I've only been using this little app a couple days now, but so far, it seems to be working great from me on my XP machine. I do a lot of audio work, which at times, can be fairly memory intensive.

I don't believe in If it ain't broke don't fix it.

I do believe in reading then trying things out to see what happens.

It prevents me from getting bored out of my mind up here on the 10th floor watching seagulls fly by and looking for something good to watch on TV.

I did happen to find Black Adder this morning which I thoroughly enjoyed.

By the way, Rowan Atkinson is Mr. Bean.

I agree, YoKenny. That's why I never recommend people use any tweaking programs or anything like nLite/vLite, why they should leave their services alone and so forth. Microsoft made their OS and they obviously know what is best. Those who complain about the bloat of the OS is because they're the same ones who complain about why something doesn't work with the OS from the get-go. So Microsoft packages drivers and other necessities.

Sorry I dont agree that microsoft knows best. They release there OS's in a default setup and leave it to admins and such to change things as needed, this is why micosoft has so many tools to do this. nlite/vlite simply takes the microsoft tools and puts them in a easy interface. Microsoft even release tools to change the setups of windows. Some common tools are sysprep, tweakui and others. how about in xp pre sp1 remeber how ms had the messaging service on by default and spammers went crazy with it?

With 1000's of different hardware systems out there there is no way ms can make things perfect. MS takes care of its corp customers before the home users, this is a common fact. In a corp environment the messaging service is a good service but for home users?

So fine tuning the OS is always a option, Why fix what ain't broke? Simple to make it more efficient.

But being a Computer admin for 14 years to hear MS knows best just about made me bust a gut. If it wasnt for Microsoft I wouldnt have a job.

Now this isnt bashing just my 2 cents.

There is always 2 sides to an issue. Now for most the default of windows is fine. But for people who want things perfect, like myself, MS provides tools for you to make things better, so even MS knows the default isnt always best.

I think in order for Firefox to drop it's mem usage whem minimized you need to have or add the config.trim_on_minimize to about:config.
FF Tweak Guide

Also setting both pipelining entries to true within about:config can speed up browsing quite a bit.

Back to windows and I have used vLite and nLite to create unattended install disks where I start the install, walk away for 20 odd minutes then come back and there's the desktop with my drivers and half my tweaks installed.

Then with XP I go over to Bold Fortune's? slimming XP guide and mainly get rid of the larger files/folders that I deem unnecessary for my setup.

One such folder I delete the contents of is the system32 dll cache which is used for backup purposes.This folder contains near on 2,500 files at around 400 meg.

Now why would I want to delete the contents and slim XP/Vista?Mainly because I use Ghost Images as backups and it means that Ghost has less data to backup improving performance not to mention that any defrags and security scans are way faster due to less data there is to defrag/scan.

But we are all different and I have a good/bad habit (which ever way you want to look at it) of ripping a system to pieces to see how it works and I have had to use my Ghost Images to get me out of the manure on quite a few occassions.

I also store Ghost Images on usb drives where I can hook up any hard drive, boot from Ghost floppy and restore any image in under 5 minutes.This also saves a full install, tweaking, slimmimg and activation.

My slimmed down Vista Ultimate install on an old 120 gig drive.

Thanks Humpty for clarifying the matter about ripping the guts out.

NEW USERS ADVICE
As you can see there are many ways of customizing a system for a specific users needs.
Keep in mind that most users have an enjoyable time with their PC by sticking to Windows as provided.
It is the best setup for most users.Especially the default settings.
The same holds true for many products that you use such as CCleaner.
If you are not knowledgeable enough yet don't try to use tools or Registry "fixers" that are only needed for very specific reasons.

Your PC will work fine for you if you clean out the junk every now and then.Defrag your hard drive only when Windows Disk Defragmenter says you need to.Use your firewall enabled and install simple to use Security programs and such.You also need a simple to use Back up program to back up your data and your most important system files.More advice can be found by a "seaerch" for 'NEW USERS ADVICE".You can also start at this link and get yourself and your PC in good basic shape.
http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?s=&...st&p=102905

Good luck to all,
davey

If I wanted perfect I would become a Tibetan monk and move to Costa Rica and open up a retreat where birds, butterflies and people could migrate to and news would come by paper once per month.

I agree with Tarun. These programmes don't do anything. It may feel faster, but actually, it probably does more harm then good. Just use CCleaner and defraggler and your PC will run smoothly. If they don't work, then a RAM upgrade is needed.

You need to do a lot of reading of this thread and many others.Including the links provided by Tarun.
He understands where we are coming from.

davey More RAM helps until you run out of RAM and ports to put it in.
P.S. There really is no agreement or disagreement on this subject.We don't believe in magic pills either.If we did this thread wouldn't be so long.

Or until your OS doesn't support any more RAM .
32Bit OS's = around 3.25 GBs
64 = A LOT MORE


AJ

I would like to try this useful-sounding program, and it seemed to install successfully, but when I check it's status in Scheduled Tasks, it says "could not start." This is on a XP SP3 system that is otherwise working properly. Does anyone have any suggestions for getting this program to run?

I'm sure the author can help!

Right click on the scheduled task and click properties, in there put a check mark on run only when logged on.

When windows xp is using an account without a password the tasks cant run so you have to tell xp to run it only when logged on.

I just updated my setup an hour ago to make the run only when logged on as default.

So hopefully no more people will run into this problem.

Shane

That seems to have fixed it. Thanks!

I'm trying to get this tool to work on my Windows 2000 machine, and I'm getting the same "could not start" error. The task properties window looks different from how it does in XP, and I don't see a "only run when logged in" check box. How do I get this running under 2000?

Hey TeeJay,
You are going to get the full story at the authors site. http://www.pcwintech.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=14
Please post your question there.
Good luck,
davey

Thanks for the link Davey, but the author does not provide any solution for getting the program to run under Windows 2000 using the task scheduler. The solution for XP is simple, but that check box does not exist in 2000. The program works if I run it manually, but it does not start using the task scheduler...

OK understood.
More members here with a possible solution or alternative scheduling method.
davey

Don't forget the Dust Bunnies Ken.

I've been using this from a Quick Launch shortcut since it was first posted, and a quick click after browsing for any length of time works for me.

That's a good idea. I've had no luck getting the automated task to work on Windows 2000, so I just added a shortcut to the Quick Launch bar and click it every so often.

After running it, should I be seeing the Mem Usage in Task Manager drop? So far, I really haven't seen much of a difference.

I would say it depends on how often and when you run it.
That's what it is for to keep down a build up over time.Must be doing the job for you.
davey

As davey says, it depends on what you're doing.

Note Opera in this before screenshot:



After using Cleanmem:



I'd already knocked Windows Explorer down from over 30mb to 3.4mb.

So with just 2 processes I've gained over 120mb of memory. Of course Opera will creep up again, but in this instance it never came anywhere near half what it was.

I'm not sure if I could notice any benefit, but thinking about it logically, and not knowing the technicalities of this so I may get shot down here, with only 512mb memory to play with, I imagine I'm using my page-file less.